Building a sense of community is an important component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, Anna Logan and Ann Marie Farrell join us to discuss strategies that can be used to cultivate belonging and increase student engagement in large classes. Anna is an Associate Professor in the School of Inclusive and Special Education and the former Dean for Teaching and Learning at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. Ann Marie is an Assistant Professor, also in the School of Inclusive and Special Education at Dublin City University. Anna and Ann Marie are both recipients of multiple teaching awards. Since 2018, they have been running an annual Pedagogy for Higher Education Large-classes Symposium.
Show Notes
- Pedagogy for Higher Education Large Classes (PHELC)
- Higher Education Advances Conference (HEAD Conference)
- Peter Felten, Elon University, North Carolina & Ann Marie Farrell, Dublin City University – Relationship-Rich Education at Scale
- Padlet
- CatchBox
- Vevox
- Mentimeter
Transcript
John: Building a sense of community is an important component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, we discuss strategies that can be used to cultivate belonging and increase student engagement in large classes.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guests today are Anna Logan and Ann Marie Farrell. Anna is an Associate Professor in the School of Inclusive and Special Education and the former Dean for Teaching and Learning at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. Ann Marie is an Assistant Professor, also in the School of Inclusive and Special Education at Dublin City University. Anna and Ann Marie are both recipients of multiple teaching awards. Since 2018, they have been running an annual Pedagogy for Higher Education Large-Classes Symposium. Welcome Anna and Anne Marie.
Anna: Thank you.
Ann Marie: Thank you.
John: Today’s teas are: … Anna, are you drinking any tea?
Anna: I am. Generally I drink Irish Breakfast tea. But on Earth, this occasion, I got something special. I’ve never had it before. It’s called Emperors Clouds and Mist, so it’s a green tea, I don’t know. Hopefully it’ll work out alright. And I’m having it in a keep cup, a glass keep cup.
Ann Marie: Well, I did not go down the fancy route, so I am drinking Barry’s tea with, I don’t know what type of actual tea it is, except that it’s Barry’s tea, and it is a staple of pretty much every cupboard in every kitchen in Ireland. So it’s standard ordinary tea.
John: And we have some of that in our office, actually. We have a nice variety there.
Rebecca: On this occasion, I got some Irish Breakfast tea. [LAUGHTER]
John: And I should have, [LAUGHTER] but I am drinking a ginger peach green tea.
Rebecca: A good favorite of John’s, of course. So we invited you here today to discuss your work related to large-class instruction. Could you each tell us a little bit about your background and interest in large-class instruction?
Ann Marie: Well, I suppose we’re both teacher educators. All of our students are either student teachers or are qualified teachers who come back to do some of our postgraduate courses. But particularly in relation to student teachers, some of our classes are quite large, and we were anxious, I suppose, to model good teaching practices in that context, especially as our students will themselves be teachers. So a number of years ago, we began to look at our work in the large-class context, particularly on a four-year Bachelor of Education primary teaching program, which, in each year group, has over 400 students, and we were teaching all 400 together in a large tiered lecture theater. So that was, I suppose, my interest in that area.
Anna: And I suppose, just to add to that, for many years I’ve taught a small number of classes that are in a large cohort, that kind of 400-plus size, and always enjoyed it, always got a buzz from the experience. And then, I think a couple of years ago, I was one day teaching that large cohort at nine o’clock in the morning in that tiered lecture theater, a quick 50-minute lecture. And later that day, I was teaching a group of six doctorate in education students, and I remember being really struck by the kind of very differential model of resourcing there: these six, eight doctoral students, really experienced practitioners, getting a lot of support and so on, versus perhaps that introductory class. But then a number of years ago, Ann Marie, who we go back a long, long way, invited me also to co-teach some of her sessions with the large cohort. And I really enjoyed that work so much, so I’d already enjoyed the dynamic of working with the large group. I had questions about it, about the equity issues associated with it. We might come back to those a little bit later. And also, I just really enjoyed working with Anne Marie and the dynamic of working hard with that large group.
Ann Marie: The pupil-teacher ratio was still one to 225.
Anna: We go back a long, long way.
Ann Marie: We were in college together with our primary degree, and then 10 years later, just totally by chance, we ended up back in college together on a postgraduate diploma course. So we go back to the 1980s as students, and then later as colleagues. [LAUGHTER]
Anna: And we’re still talking to one another, which is good. Always helps. [LAUGHTER]
John: That’s wonderful. Can you tell us about your Pedagogy for Higher Education Large Classes project?
Ann Marie: Yeah, I suppose I can tell you a little bit about that. The Pedagogy for Higher Education Large-Class symposium (or PHELC) symposium, began really as a one-off event. We were invited to run a pre-conference workshop at a wonderful conference held annually in Valencia every year called the Higher Education Advances Conference, or the HEAD Conference. So in 2019 we ran that pre-conference workshop face to face, and again, a pre-conference workshop for the same conference in 2020 online when the pandemic hit. And in the course of that, we set up a website. I suppose, we set up a model for the symposium that then became an event in its own right. So we’ve run it now for six years, and we’ve attracted people both online… the last five have been entirely online… and we’ve attracted people from all over the world who are engaging with very large-class numbers and large-class cohorts, albeit in different contexts. But many of the challenges, and more importantly, many of the possibilities that have been experienced by those higher education teachers, is our focus at that symposium. So we look for papers based on research, but also based on reflective practice, with the aim of reducing the fear and angst around large-class teaching and giving people who are doing some really good work in that area, a platform to share that work with others. So we also set up a website, and most of the presentations and all of the papers, we asked presenters to write an accompanying paper along with their presentation. They are all available on phelc.ie, PHELC.ie, for anyone to look at. The Symposium is free, we usually get funding here in Ireland, and I suppose our main aim is just to enable access to anyone who wishes to participate, either to listen or to present, that there’s no barriers. So hence the online, and hence no conference fee for it.
Rebecca: But Anne Marie, you said it started as a one off, I think it’s still going.
Ann Marie: Oh, it’s still going. We’ve done six [LAUGHTER] and our initial intention was just to do the pre-conference workshop in Valencia in 2019 but it became evident that there was an interest in that area. The Conference Committee invited us back again the following year to do a second workshop on this topic, but we just got a lot of very good feedback from participants. We also had put in a huge amount of work into developing the website, developing the workshop or the symposium, and we love large-class teaching. We had done a lot of work in that area ourselves, and it just allowed for our pedagogical practice and that to be mapped onto the scholarship of teaching and learning, and to give people an opportunity to engage in scholarly discussions, be it at the symposium or in terms of the papers that they submit, that they could align their teaching practice along with their academic writing, researcher-type practice. So we’re still going. Now we are at a crossroads, Anna and I were just wondering if we will continue with our annual symposium, or maybe we might move to a symposium, perhaps that maybe every second year, and broaden out maybe to do some more focused publication and research, perhaps every other year, we’re not sure. So we’re due to carve out a day or two to work out what we’re going to do going forward, but we will be doing something going forward.
Anna: And we were always committed, John, to open education resources, so all the publications are available as OERs and so on. So again, I think reflecting Anne Marie’s observation, we tried face to face, we tried HyFlex, we tried online, and what we’re really interested in kind of equity and making sure there’s no barriers. So we have had people from all across the world, and we’re committed to the resources we produce being available to everybody.
John: Excellent, and we’ll include a link to the website in the show notes, so if people would like to check out those papers they can do so. One of the things we’ve noticed, in the U.S., at least, is that as we brought in more first-gen students and more low-income students, we see increased DFW rates and one concern that a lot of people have with large classes is that it might be easier for students to get lost. What’s your perspective on addressing that issue of students feeling disconnected from their class and their instructor, when they’re in such a large-class environment, and I teach a very large-class as well.
Anna: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question, John. And just thinking a little bit about it, and it’s interesting, it was actually some colleagues that I met on my sabbatical where I first heard that term “weed out,” because it’s not a term that would be much used, in the Irish context anyway. On the one hand, you know, looking at the data, I suspect that that notion of attrition or non-progression or drop out is potentially maybe slightly lower in the Irish context. The latest figures coming from our higher education authority are putting us at about 85% progression from first year, which is, I think, pretty good. That said, it’s interesting that the rates of progression are considerably lower among male students, but also among students who come from socio-economically disadvantaged groups. And coming back to your question and the question of relationships. I suspect that that failing to build relationships, or build connections with classmates or with lecturers or to feel that they belong in the community, whether it’s large or small, is very likely to be a significant factor in that dropout. Again, I think interestingly, it reminds us when we look at that, and it certainly was something I know we discussed at our most recent PHELC Symposium the importance of the relationships when teaching at scale, and that not making any assumptions. Sometimes, maybe as lecturers, we assume that students are well connected, that they have a good network. That’s very often not the case. So while, as I say, the data might not be quite as strong and we don’t have maybe that concept of a “weed out class,” I think it still doesn’t preclude the fact that a concern to foster a community that is relationship rich is important, regardless of the context.
John: I noticed in last summer’s PHELC symposium, there was a paper that you presented Ann Marie with Peter Felton on relationship-rich education in large-classes. Could you talk just a little bit about that?
Ann Marie: I suppose myself and Peter, in his context, would look at very large classes from the perspective of building a relationship, that it is possible to build a relationship, whereas sometimes, I think it can feel, sometimes, to some higher education teachers, that it’s almost impossible to have a relationship but you don’t know anyone’s names, or you might know very few names. But you can build a relationship with a really big class in different ways, even though you don’t know their name: very simple things like smile when people are walking in the room, say hi as they’re passing you heading up to the seat, have a wander around the room, don’t stay stuck down at the bottom, move. So like when I’m in a class, I share my proximity. I wear a headset. I move away from the podium. I’m up the back while I’m speaking, looking over the shoulders to make sure they’re not booking flights or watching YouTube while I’m chatting. And we use different teaching approaches and strategies in that large-class context to mix up how we relate with the students like Anna and I co-teaching. So when we co-teach, we tend to use a workshop format for at least some part of that session, which then allows myself and Anna to walk up the steps of the room. We chat to small groups. So we literally, physically bring ourselves closer to the students. You can have a bit of fun in class. If you do get to know some of the students, you can invite those students to help you change the dynamic, the colder dynamic, to make it warmer, then we can talk about that in a minute, in terms of chatting with Class Reps and that sort of thing. So I suppose in the first instance, it being the potential of having a relationship, like, if you take it completely out of teaching, really huge groups like Coldplay, Robbie Williams have a massive relationship with 10s of 1000s of people standing in front of them, and they don’t know any of them, but there is a feeling, there’s an empathy generated in that really large context. And I’m not saying that we have to be Robbie Williams or Chris Martin at all. That’s not what I’m saying, but it’s just really in the teacher’s perception of what is possible there. And I know with my work with large-classes, they are my favorite. My final-year students, I’d say I know names of 10 of them. There are 430 in the room. I love that class because there is such a two-way flow in communication in the room and between sessions on back channels. It could be something like we have, in the Moodle we use here, an in-built chat function, then a module page on Moodle, but something like Padlet where students can ask questions anonymously without having to put their hands up in a really big group, allows to build up that relationship as well. And it doesn’t just mean you answer the questions in class if they ask them in class, but it also allows them a way to reach you between classes, so if something might occur to them afterwards. So I would check that kind of a back channel between the sessions, and whether I answer the questions in class or not, I answer them in writing, one way or another, on that back channel. And you don’t even need technology in class. If people are a bit reluctant to speak, you can use a scrap of paper or post it, or something like that. It’s just to get the student voice and to capture that whatever way you can, so that you’re capturing their voice and their feeling that you’re listening and that they are engaging at that level in the class. So all of those sorts of strategies build up a teacher-student relationship. The way you would in small class of 20 may be a bit more naturally, but you just need to think about it in a different way. That’s about perception, around how you perceive or what you perceive as a possibility in that very large context. And it means that, in my own case, when I look at like I’m currently, this semester, working with 430 final-year Bachelor of Education student teachers, and they’re my favorite class. I love them, and I feel I have a relationship with them, and I feel I have a good relationship with them, even though, out of the 430 I probably could name 10 people outside, but I feel I have a relationship with them in spite of that. But just I think it is how we as teachers perceive numbers and what’s big. What does a large-class mean, actually? So for me, I think 400 is large, and then I visited somebody working in Sweden, who has over 600 in his classes. So mine suddenly seems very little compared to his.
Rebecca: I think your connection of using performance or concerts or theater as an example of where you can feel connection to performers is a good example of how students can feel connected to their faculty in these large settings.
Anna: Ann Marie has mentioned, and she’s right, that it’s about our perceptions of size and what’s possible and the possibilities. There’s also a little bit of it that is about students’ expectations and students’ perceptions, and sometimes a lot of our large-class teaching is in your traditional tier lecture theater with a podium at the front. And it’s no accident that Ann Marie has a great relationship with her final-year students, because she works with them in that large group in first year. But it’s also, I think, about over time, building their expectation that they are valued, that, as Ann Marie said, simple things like smiling, that there’s an expectation that we want to have a relationship with them, that we value that, that it isn’t that disembodied voice that’s standing at the podium and lecturing at them, that it is about relationships and it is about community and assessment is another way in which we can set that up, too.
Rebecca: We’ve talked a little bit about the differences in how you might build relationships in large versus small settings. And Anna, you also talked about the difference in your experience of going from a big class to a small, intimate doctoral setting. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit more about, from the perspective of faculty, the difference in instruction between teaching these large classes and teaching small classes?
Anna: Yeah, again, I think it is, apart from thinking about the equity challenges and the message that that conveys, sometimes, some of the literature talks about information transmission approaches in a large class, versus dialogic teaching and exploration and so on. And it sometimes strikes me, and having worked closely with Ann Marie over the years as well, that actually the difference in the large class, as Ann Marie said several times, it’s about kind of not just ruling anything out, but thinking, well, if I do want to create a relationship, or I do want to elicit learners voice in that context, how am I going to do it? Rather than just saying, “Well, it’s just not possible, and it has to be that information transmission piece.” For me, it strikes me that in order to do it well, the instructor, the educator, has to be much more deliberate, much more careful in their planning, not just thinking about their learning content, but thinking about the things we’ve spoken about, like the relationships, like, how am I going to elicit students voice? How am I going to build in formative feedback? Because it’s not, perhaps, as natural as in that context, where I was working with six or eight doctoral students who were coming to the session with me, having set prior reading and that they were anticipating and fully expecting. Their expectation was that was going to be dialog, lots of exchange of views, and that’s why I think two little things can make a difference that break down that barrier in the large-class, in terms of setting our expectations of what’s possible, for not just for ourselves as higher education teachers, but also for our students as well.
John: In large-classes, students are often somewhat reluctant to volunteer responses or to ask questions. You’ve already addressed that a little bit in terms of having a backchannel. Are there any other strategies that you use to help students become more comfortable participating in larger classes?
Ann Marie: Yes, so I usually, when I have a large-class, email the Class Rep prior to the module beginning, and I try to meet them, either online or face to face for 10 or 15 minutes, at least for the first couple of weeks. And when I meet them, I request that they will help me to teach in the first couple of weeks by asking and answering questions in class. In most cases, they kind of step back a bit in horror and because they don’t like speaking in the large-class context at all. And these are Class Reps who have put themselves out there anyway, but they’re still not comfortable in that context. So what I usually do is I go through the forthcoming session, I tell them the questions I’m going to ask, and I give them potential answers to those questions. And then for other parts of the session, I give them questions to ask me, and then I get one student to monitor the back channel so that I’m not reading out the questions that have been posted. It’s a student reading it out, one of the reps as well. And I have a little mic called a CatchBox that’s in a foam dice type item. And it’s a microphone that can be thrown around the room like a foam football, and it allows the students to speak in their normal voices without need to raise them. So the reps that I have set up then models answering and asking questions. They model the use of the CatchBox. And even in the first session, you find that some people that I have not planted who are on the edge of courage tip over and have the courage to ask the questions they’re dying to ask. And by the time they get to the third session, I don’t need to set up anyone anymore. There will always be a few people who will ask questions, and the fact that the student is monitoring the Padlet or the backchannel of the typed and posted questions by default, means you get student voice as well. So I have found that a really useful way of gathering the student voice, and also, if you do set a task in the class, or if Anna and I are co-teaching in the workshop, because they’ve spoken, we do something like a think-pair-share where they’ve chatted one or two others, they have a bit more courage to respond as well, because they’ve already sussed out the response. They’ve already sussed out the question. They’ve teased out a couple of things between themselves, plus we’re walking around the room answering questions. So sometimes when that happens, I might be chatting to a group, two or three, during the task, and we have a little chat, and then I say, “Right, I’m going to come back to you now with the CatchBox, and I want you to say the whole class exactly what you’ve just said to me,” and again, you get a little worried look, but one of them will do it. So again, I think Anna, what you said there is right, the very deliberate actions in that big setting really help to gather the student voice.
Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about student reps. Can you talk a little bit more about what they are and how you’ve designated them,
Ann Marie: They either volunteer or sometimes there might be a vote amongst the student body. So every year group, on every program, has student representatives, and the number of representatives vary depending on the size of the year group. So in a year group with 400 students, there are a minimum of six class representatives, and they’re volunteers. They’re linked with the students union, and their role is, I suppose, as a liaison or a communication between the union, between the Program Chair, and the staff of the program, and the students. So they’re a conduit for information between staff and students and between the university and students.
John: You mentioned using a CatchBox, and I’ve always wanted to use one. I saw them at a conference in SUNY Oneonta a while back. Do you toss it to specific students, or do you just toss it in the crowd to get responses?
Ann Marie: So the first time we bought it, I was delighted. I walked into the large class, and I asked a question, and I threw it in to the middle of the crowd, and they threw it back at me, [LAUGHTER] a few times, [LAUGHTER] so I never did that again. [LAUGHTER] So that is why I model it, that is why I set up the first couple of sessions. So the students I choose, or the rest, or whoever’s helping me, they scatter through the room, and then I make it very clear that when I ask a question, they have to put their hand up high so I can see them. And then I will throw the Catchbox to them. They throw it back to me. If I’m on my own, if I’m the only teacher in the room, with two aisles, I’ll stand on one aisle, and I might ask a random student to stand on the other aisle, and I’ll throw it across to that student if I’m trying to reach somebody on the far side. So in my experience, I would caution against just randomly throwing it into the group, because people are very happy to use you as target practice. It doesn’t hurt if it hits you on the head, by the way. [LAUGHTER]
Anna: In those large-classes, we tend to use a headset mic because we want to do all that moving around the room in terms of building relationships. And when we first started that, before we had the Catchbox, we used to have hand-held microphones, the ones that move around. But I think we’re all the same. We tried to put that up to a student who we know has something wonderful to add from the work, but they all recoiled in horror, but I do think they enjoy the Catchbox. But again, as Ann Marie said, it’s about being deliberate and setting it up. That’s why it works.
Rebecca: So you both talked a lot about co-teaching and working with each other. Can you talk a little bit more about the benefits of this practice?
Anna: Co-teaching is interesting because you mentioned at the beginning, we’re both in the School of Inclusive and Special Education. And I know the language about university structures is different, but basically we’re in a department of 18 academics, and we’re all focused on inclusive and special education. And I know it’s the same in the United States and in many countries in the world, but one of the models of support for children in elementary and high schools, for example, that is very often used as a way to support more inclusive approaches, rather than withdrawing children from their mainstream classroom, is co-teaching. So the concept of co-teaching, as in, let’s define it, let’s use a standard definition of two or more adults in a single physical space delivering instruction. So that’s the definition of it that is used in the compulsory education sector, in elementary schools and high schools. We’ve looked a bit at the literature. The definition of what constitutes co-teaching is not at all as clear, it seems to us, in higher education, because co-teaching can be used just to describe a number of faculty members, sequentially teaching separately, within a module or within a course, for example. But, I suppose, coming back, co-teaching is an important concept. It’s kind of a threshold concept as part of looking at inclusion for a lot of our work with undergraduate students in those large courses and also larger courses. So a few years ago, I would have been responsible for teaching content in relation to working with special needs assistance, but also delivering some input on co-teaching. So it’s a concept that we want our students to grapple with, but we also enjoyed teaching the large class. So in the interest of modeling, walking the walk, talking the talk, Ann Marie invited me into the classroom to model that co-teaching. That was a really interesting experience for us. We did a little bit of research about it. We got students’ perspectives, but we also brought in some observers to observe us co-teaching. We know the literature about co-teaching, that for it to work well, it has to be very carefully planned. And we did plan. Initially, Ann Marie, I think we spent a lot of time really thinking, mapping out that 50-minute session. Typically, we’re talking about a 50-minute session, later we did longer sessions, but we really mapped it out, and what exactly I would be doing at a particular point in the lecture, what Ann Marie would be doing, what students would be doing. And we also thought about the kind of different models of co-teaching, because literature talks about lots of different models of co-teaching. So we thought about those, and what were we actually teaching? The really interesting thing was that the observers told us we needed to be more explicit, because, again, it’s no more than that kind of notion of maybe students come into the university and come into that tiered lecture theater, and they think about it like a theater, for example, and they think, “Well, I’m here to be passive and and I’m then going to get these wonderful thoughts from the professor on the podium at the front of the stage. So they also seem to be, in some instances, a little bit thrown by the fact that… Ann Marie, you might talk a bit more about that… about the two of us being in the room. It kind of threw them out of their comfort zone in terms of what was the expected model. So our observers noted that and reminded us that we needed to be explicit. This is why we’re modeling this. We’re modeling this because we think it’s really important for you to understand this concept and how it works, because you’re going to be a teacher. That’s taken me well away from the original question, which was about why we were using it. We were using it because we wanted to replicate workshop type activities that we would typically engage in with a much smaller group. And one of the supports for doing that was to have more than one teacher in the room.
Ann Marie: Anna said one of our reasons for using it was to model the process of co-teaching, because our students are going to be teachers. But other people have used co-teaching to model, let’s say, social workers. I can’t remember the author, but there is a paper on social work education and social workers using that co-teaching model to model different perspectives around a case conference or something like that. So it also enables, if you’re a higher education teacher, engaging in something that’s a contested concept or a contested idea. You can use the co-teaching model to show that contestation, because the two people are very likely to be coming into the room with perhaps different views and different insights. And you can model that carefully in that context. The most important thing, I think, around the co-teaching, is that you’re fairly comfortable with the person you’re co-teaching with, and that it is carefully planned. It’s a fair bit of work when you first do it, but once the planning is done for a session, like Anna and I started this about 14, 15, years ago, and where we have continued to co-teach for subsequent years, the work’s done. We know what we’re doing, but it was a heavy investment of time the first year we did it, but after that, it’s worth it, absolutely worth it, because it enabled us to do workshops with very large groups that I would have struggled to do on my own.
John: And it can provide a really rich experience for students. When I was a college student, two of my most memorable classes were team taught by two instructors. One was on bioethics, where there was a biologist and a philosopher, and the other one was on the philosophy of social sciences, where there was a philosopher and a sociologist teaching together with very, very different perspectives on all of it. And the ability to go back and forth and present different perspectives is really healthy. You had mentioned, though, doing some work with think-pair-share and some group activities. Could you talk more about what other type of small group activities you do in your large-classes?
Ann Marie: So usually what we do in those classes, it depends on the workshop, or it depends on the focus. So for example, on Monday, a couple of days ago, myself and another one of my colleagues, co-taught a workshop with the ED 4 group, and the focus of the workshop was on their assignments. I use universal design for learning in my own pedagogical practice with these students to model how to use it in teaching and learning, and part of the Universal Design is in the assignments. So I give them an awful lot of choice in terms of topics. I use authentic assessment. I’ve asked them to write for an audience that is not me. They choose their audience and so on. But they’re also allowed to work with who they want and how many they want, between two and five. Some people are very comfortable working in small groups, others are very happy to work with four others or whatever, but I give them all those choices. And then last month, the workshop we ran was for one and a half hours on planning for that assignment. So my objective was they walked out of there at the end of that session, before our reading week next week, with a plan of action to tackle that assignment. So the way that was structured was, I suppose, almost like a dance between myself and themselves. So I brought them through each criterion, they were supported by a writing frame that I gave per group, and I asked them to complete each step of the plan for their assignment based on the criteria and the expectation of the structure of that so that’s an example of a type of in-class task where they work together, in that case, choosing who to work with. And we stepped it so that we have six steps, but they completed one step, myself and the other teacher, Christina, wandered the room, and we came back after each step and summarized what we were seeing and filled in the gaps and then moved to the next step. That was a full tiered or stepped task. In other workshops or in other contexts, we might ask students to just talk about a key concept, they might not necessarily write anything. Give them five six minutes to talk about it. We’ll wander the room and then come back together and ask one or two to share with that. Sometimes, we might use the backchannel on our Moodle page for them to post what they’ve taught or things like, what does the word exclusion mean to you in a school context? So it just depends. We don’t structure the group because we can’t. They’re too big. The other thing I would say, though, is, in terms of very large-classes, it often, sometimes with me and often exclusively in other modules, they’re split into small groups, so they’re in workshop groups of 13, 14, or 15 workshop groups. In some modules, they’re never together as a big group, and there’s a bit of thinking, because it’s in a large-class, but what you’re managing there is the consistency across teachers’ input in class, formative feedback and so on. So yes, the group is smaller, but you’ve a whole curricular planning thing there to consider that I don’t have to consider when I have a big group. However, when the big class is split into those smaller groups of 20 or 30, you know who you have in your group, so you can plan for those groups of 30, whereas in my big class, I don’t know who’s talking to whom, so I can’t manage it at that level.
Anna: And we mentioned the think-pair-share, we would use that quite a lot, but using the same activity, but with lots of different kinds of materials. So it might be looking at samples of children’s work, for example, and within that group in the large lecture theater, we might roughly divide the room into four areas, and each quadrant, let’s say, would look at a particular piece of work, and then we’re looking for them to listen carefully when we take feedback from, it might be the same child’s piece of work, so they’re invested in kind of hearing of the other groups, while they might actually only be actively working in their small groups or in their pair on one piece of material, but they’re actively taking feedback from the activities that the other learners have been engaged in in the large-class. The other thing that Ann Marie uses really effectively is the panel idea within a large-class, bringing in a panel of speakers. I think that’s particularly effective in that large-class.
Ann Marie: It’s highly engaging. So with one of my groups, the module is on inclusion and inclusive pedagogy and inclusive practice in education, all contested terms. So to model the multiple perspectives, I bring in panels of guest speakers. So for example, I have one panel of parents and young people who talk to my students about their experiences of primary school. Now you could hear a pin drop [LAUGHTER] in those classes. It’s highly impactful, 10 times more impactful than me summarizing what the literature says about parental and student experience of inclusion. It literally demonstrates multiple perspectives. I have a second panel then, with teachers in different teaching contexts, and a third for a different team. So in other words, with the very large class, that’s this particular final-year group, every session is different. So I use three sessions where I have panels, I’ve two or three workshops where we have asked students to engage in a particular task, and a couple of sessions that are much more like a traditional lecture, albeit that we try and find a space for them to do something in that session, just to break it up a bit. So no two sessions are the same, and I try as well with those very large classes. Your question to Anna was about losing students, particularly in first year. I do wonder sometimes, is it not so much the class that’s large, but the program, it’s not just your module and your class is large, but lots of classes are large. There’s a multiplicity of experiences those students are trying to navigate. The large-class context can be the glue that brings some of those isolated learning experiences that are at a modular level back to the class. So for example, I think, after reading week next week, two of the co-taught sessions are with people who are teaching other modules with this same group. So they’re coming in to my session, we’re going to co-teach the session. They’re going to come in and make the links with what they’re doing in their modules, and I’m going to make the links within our module so that they’re getting an opportunity to see two of us working across the program, as well as somebody like myself and Anna, who are within the same module, but these are people in different modules. I do think that goes back to helping students make the links and the engagement for them to see that the two teachers in two completely different modules are now working together.
Anna: The other thing I would just add, in terms of Ann Marie’s panel, for example, in the panels that Ann Marie brings in, there is something particularly impactful of those real stories, real lived experiences. When they are heard in a very large context that enhances the impact of the experience for example. Because we were just talking there a couple of days ago, Ann Marie and I, and sometimes we talk about engagement, and I don’t know whether it’s the case in other universities, but a big focus on active engagement. There’s almost an assumption that that means that learners have to be up and about doing something, writing something, engaging with a student response system like Vevox or Menti or whatever it is, listening and listening to a powerful story like that, particularly when you’re part of a very large group, and it’s a powerful story, it enhances the impact of that, in fact, being in that large group.
Ann Marie: It does. And by the time we got to our third panel last week, one of the students in the group was on the panel. She came to me with something that had struck her, and she agreed, with a little bit of persuasion to be one of the panelists. And that’s powerful.
Rebecca: It always strikes me how, when I’ve had guest speakers come in and talk to students, that they can say the same thing that I’m going to say, but if someone else says it, it’s truth.
Ann Marie: Because it is their truth. So all of our speakers are speaking from personal or professional standpoint. It’s their lived experience, whether it’s personal or professional, whereas sometimes we might be talking about someone else’s experience sort of a step away. And I suppose that’s another thing, especially in the arts classes, is sharing yourself with the students and just giving them an insight into your experience. In my case, my past teaching experience, my own experience of my son’s engagement with school and little hurdles he’s had to hop over and those sorts of things and that, in terms of relationships in class, makes a difference as well. You suddenly were human, rather than the person who popped in for 50 minutes, dropped the pearls of wisdom and then runs out the door again.
John: What types of formative and summative assessment techniques have you found to be most successful in large-class instruction?
Ann Marie: I suppose some of the things we’ve mentioned are based on formative assessments and feedback. So a lot of those workshop type scenarios, and even when students are working on different case studies and different items and materials on the Moodle page, we will then provide feedback on all of those items, including the ones they’re not using. And sometimes I’ll use a little screencast, just a 3, 4, 5 minutes, to explain and fill in the gaps by feel from the class that they maybe they haven’t got it or whatever. Summative assessment can be trickier, and I think one of the challenges higher education teachers face with very large cohorts, the biggest one might be around the assessment and being fair, being manageable and so on. So I’ve grappled with this. I’m still grappling with it. I’ve two very, very large-classes, and I do something different with each and that’s because of the amount of content in the module that I’m part of. Other people who also have assessments in it and so on. With that fourth-year group, I have found that taking on the perspective of Universal Design for Learning in designing assessment and coupling that with authentic assessment approaches and viewing assessment as learning rather than of learning has changed how I experience the assessment process. So with that group that I have at the moment, for example, I have 430 students. I’m going to get, this December, about 140 assignments across all of them, a fair bit of work in that, in terms of marking and feedback and everything. I won’t deny that, but the most interesting set of assignments that I get, because they’re all doing something different, and they all present, so I’ll get websites…. They’re all creating a resort for a named audience, but they can create it in whatever way they like, and they really seem to buy into it, because they’ve got so much choice. So with that group that works, the multi-layered choices work, who to work with, what to do, who to write for, because they’re fourth years. But with my first-year group, which is 450 in it, I don’t offer those same range of choices. In that case, they have a fair bit of assessment in that particular module, so I have to cut my cloth to be fair to the student, and I’m not entirely happy with the assessment I have. It’s very applied. It’s based on case studies. We do similar, aligned case studies inside the class, in a workshop style format. They’re the co-taught sessions that Anna and I do, and then they do something similar themselves, but I still haven’t nailed that large-class first-year group, giving them options around what to do, who to work with, isn’t as fair as it is for the fourth years just because of where they’re at in the course of the size of the module they’re engaged with. So that’s my next task now, is to have a think about that and changing that before I meet that particular first-year group. It is challenging, but I would say particularly with my fourth-year group, the Universal Design for Learning Framework and applying that range of choices slowly and iteratively over time to see what worked, has completely changed my assignment/assessment marking experience, completely.
Anna: The other side of that coin, of course, is the feedback piece, which, as Ann Marie has said, the assessment piece at scale is particularly challenging. So is feedback. And again, it’s a bit like sometimes I do a lot of group feedback using exemplars as proxies for feedback. Sometimes, I think lots of higher education teachers have the same experience. Students nearly need to be hit over the head and told, this is feedback. This is relevant to you, that unless it’s actually on their assignment. And I know investing a lot of time, Ann Marie has said, in that first-year model where we’ve done the co-teaching, we model the task, we scaffold the task. There’s a lot of connections between the Moodle DLE in the classroom, so there’s lots of exemplars there. And that took an awful lot of time, sort of building that up when we started first, a lot of time, but it doesn’t change. I think of the example, Ann Marie, where we were giving feedback, asking students to write S.M.A.R.T. learning targets. That’s kind of a universal element, for example, in teacher education. And the investment in time in giving collective group feedback on the DLE, on various iterations of less and more specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound targets. It’s a lot of investment time initially, but it doesn’t change.
Ann Marie: Then it’s done. It took us hours the first year, then it’s done. You get the same type things back from following year groups.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?
Ann Marie: Well, we are rethinking PHELC. So we’ll watch the space for that. We just need to think about where we might go with that, how we might expand it, maybe beyond us, and what we might do above and beyond our symposium. And then, as I said, in terms of the large-class teaching, it’s always what’s next. Like no two years are the same. We change. I love changing it. I’m basing the feedback from students as well. Each iteration of a module, the delivery of a module, might be a little bit different, and I am hoping, particularly with that fourth-year module, that the assessments that some of the really excellent ones, I’m developing a repository for those, which I’m hoping will become a site for publication at undergraduate level, in the first instance, within the university, but maybe further afield down the line. That’s a long term, big project that I’ve just dipped my toe in the water off. So I’ll let you know. [LAUGHTER]
Anna: And I suppose, just beyond our own work, one of the things we mentioned was the co-teaching and how much we have enjoyed over the years working together, and that has mainly been in the large class. So for me, and I mentioned that, one of the things we’ve done was we invited people to come in and observe. So one thing that I’m really interested in is that opportunity to be in other large classes, to be that observer, to maybe support other colleagues in their large-class work and so on, and any opportunity I can get to co-teach and to work with other people out there, embracing.
John: Well, thank you. This was a fascinating conversation, and we look forward to talking to you more in the future.
Anna: Thank you, John, and thank you Rebecca, for the opportunity. This was great.
Ann Marie: Absolutely. It’s been lovely to speak with you. Thank you for inviting us.
Anna: Indeed.
Rebecca: Well, thank you for some great ideas.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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